Virident Grabs $21 Million From Intel Capital, Cisco, Sequoia And More For Enterprise Storage Solutions

Virident, a company that offers flash-based storage solutions for enterprise, announced today that it has closed a $21 million series C funding round. The investment was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with strategic investments from Intel Capital, Cisco and contributions from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. The series C round brings Virident to a total of $37 million in funding.

So why the interest in Virident? For starters, the startup’s management team counts former Google, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, SGI, and Intel employees among its ranks. So it has some talent. Second, the (enterprise) storage space is hot. And Virident has built flash solutions that are compatible with any servers and allow enterprises to enhance not only the speed of their applications but to ensure reliable performance under heavy workloads, specifically for data-intensive workloads, like databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Virident is operating under the belief that bringing flash memory to the storage space (both for data centers and enterprise storage) will fundamentally disrupt how information is stored. As Virident CEO Kumar Ganapathy told infoTECH, a future may well be coming in which the very flash memory chips that are built into billions of smartphones today force data centers “to adopt a completely new storage architecture with massive cost reductions and a significantly smaller footprint”. For Virident, the future is all about solid state devices.

Thus, the funding announcement today goes hand-in-hand with the company’s introduction of the next generation of its flagship product, Virident FlashMAX. The new product, according to the company, allows enterprise application performance to be optimized and, something that they reiterate over and over — consistent over time, across a wide variety of dataset sizes and diverse workloads — while “providing at least twice the performance of comparably flash-based solutions”. The product also comes with built-in, Flash-aware RAID.

Virident will use its series C round for market expansion and product iteration.